The electronics industry has experienced an ever increasing demand for smaller and faster electronic devices which are simultaneously able to support a greater number of increasingly complex and sophisticated functions. Accordingly, there is a continuing trend in the semiconductor industry to manufacture low-cost, high-performance, and low-power integrated circuits (ICs). Thus far these goals have been achieved in large part by scaling down semiconductor IC dimensions (e.g., minimum feature size) and thereby improving production efficiency and lowering associated costs. However, such scaling has also introduced increased complexity to the semiconductor manufacturing process. Thus, the realization of continued advances in semiconductor ICs and devices calls for similar advances in semiconductor manufacturing processes and technology.
For example, as metal gate electrodes and high-K gate dielectrics have replaced traditional polysilicon gate electrodes and silicon dioxide dielectrics, one of the key challenges has been to find metal electrode layers having appropriate work function values. To that end, a variety of metal electrode layers, and combinations thereof, having a variety of work function values (e.g., near a conduction band-edge, near a valence band-edge, or near mid-gap) have been investigated for application in a variety of device types (e.g., 2D and/or 3D N-type/P-type FETs).